


i can't let you go but i need to (i'll bleed if i have to)

by knoxoursavior



Category: DC Cinematic Universe, Justice League (2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Character Death, Hanahaki Disease, M/M, One-Sided Attraction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-06
Updated: 2018-01-06
Packaged: 2019-03-01 06:38:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,319
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13289148
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/knoxoursavior/pseuds/knoxoursavior
Summary: The day they bring Clark back to life is the day it gets worse.





	i can't let you go but i need to (i'll bleed if i have to)

**Author's Note:**

> [hanahaki disease](https://fanlore.org/wiki/Hanahaki_Disease) is when someone coughs up flowers because of one-sided love. they die eventually, unless their love is returned or unless they get surgery. surgery involves removing the plant but it also means removing their feelings.
> 
> also title from [reese lansangan's bleed](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Kk5rBKYz10). if u wanna give it a listen and like rock then there's [franco's cover](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C942Oz9dBvQ).

Two months after Clark’s funeral, Bruce sits in the Cave and stares at his X-ray results. He’s been having trouble breathing, and now he knows why. At first, he thinks that it’s Ivy, that it's something she managed to slip past his defenses, so he pays her a visit.

“It’s not my doing,” Ivy says. Bruce is perched on her window. A year ago, he would have had her by her throat, threatening to throw her out the window.

“You know what it is?” Bruce asks, because there’s this look in her eyes, like she knows and she pities him for it. Bruce looks at the line of her shoulders, tense. She’s seen this before and she doesn’t like it.

“I do. I can help you, but there’s a price,” she says. When she looks over her shoulder, her eyes are kind. They’re the sort of kind that Bruce hates, the sort he first saw when his parents died and it seemed like no one could ever find the right words to say to him. Poison Ivy is headstrong, passionate, but she’s never been kind to Bruce. It must be bad, whatever it is, for her to offer to help him.

“What’s happening to me?” Bruce aks.

“It’s called the Hanahaki disease. Look it up and come back if you want my help,” she says, and so Bruce does.

Most of what he finds are urban legends, secondhand accounts that seem more like horror stories than truth. Still, it doesn’t take long for him to figure out what it is—a parasite borne out of feelings he shouldn’t have. He’s in love with a dead man he tried to kill, and it’s his own fault.

But he doesn’t stop visiting Clark’s grave every month. He doesn’t stop rereading Clark’s articles, compiled in a folder on his personal laptop. He doesn’t stop feeling warmth in his chest and pinpricks in the corners of his eyes when he thinks of Clark, and he doesn’t stop coughing up dark blue petals dotted with blood.

Bruce is fine, though. He’s okay. It never escalates enough for him to need more than cough drops and a pocket to put the five or so petals that find their way up his throat everyday. It’s as much of an inconvenience as a cut on his arm or a headache—nothing he can’t handle.

  
  
  


The day they bring Clark back to life is the day it gets worse. Maybe it’s because he was in love with an idea, with the few moments he had as Clark's ally, the words that Clark spun. Now, faced with Clark who’s alive and warm and whose smile makes Bruce’s heart clench in his chest, Bruce finds himself wanting to come closer to him.

He knows he has to be careful. He has to be careful about this plant that’s taken root inside of him, slowly growing and spreading until it’ll be all that’s left of him. He tries not to look at Clark unless he has to. He pairs Clark off with Diana or Victor for missions. If it weren’t for Clark seeking him out, trying to start conversations and trying to be Bruce’s friend, maybe he wouldn’t be coughing up ten times as many petals as he did before.

“I don’t understand you, Bruce. When he was dead, you talked about Kal like he hung the moon. Now, he comes to me, asking if you still hate him,” Diana tells him. She managed to corner him in the Cave after a meeting with the team. Alfred probably helped her; Bruce wouldn’t be surprised.

Bruce keeps typing, even when his throat closes up at the mention of Clark.

“Bruce, please. I don’t know why you’re doing this but Kal doesn’t deserve this,” Diana says, and then she’s gone. She’s said what she has to say, and now she’s giving Bruce a chance to do the right thing.

She’s right, of course. Clark doesn’t deserve to take the brunt of Bruce’s problems. Bruce either has to cut off contact with Clark altogether or allow himself to be Clark’s friend and at least die happy. The first isn’t much of an option, considering Clark’s part of the team and Bruce needs to stay with the team, prepare them while he can.

So Bruce goes with the second option. Diana can take care of the team when he's gone. Bruce has faith in Dick to come back to Gotham when she needs him. And with Clark back—well. The world will be fine now that Clark’s back.

  
  
  


Sometimes, Bruce looks at Clark and wonders how someone like him could exist. He’s made up of contradictions. He’s an alien who’s more human than anyone else Bruce knows, a being who can wipe out millions of people but chooses to save them instead. He should be as broken as Bruce is, and yet he manages to smile like he means it, to talk to downtrodden, dispirited people and inspire them to do better.

Bruce doesn’t believe in karma, but maybe this is it. Maybe this is punishment for all the things he’s done, all the blood he had on his hands.

Bruce looks at Clark and feels his throat closing up because someone like Clark couldn’t possibly love someone like Bruce.

  
  
  


Clark gives him a present for his birthday. It’s not the first or only gift he’s received today. Alfred gave him new cufflinks, while Diana gives him a matching tie and pocket square set. Barry dropped off some socks and a handwritten note that says it’s all he could afford but he hopes Bruce will still take him out for pizza. Even Dick sends him a _World’s Okayest Dad_ mug that makes Bruce smile and his heart clench at the same time.

Clark flies over to Gotham and holds up a paper bag in his hands, a shy little smile on his face. Bruce must take too long to respond, because Clark raises his eyebrows and sets it on Bruce’s desk instead of waiting for Bruce to take it.

“You didn’t have to,” Bruce says.

“You’re my friend, Bruce. I want to give you a gift,” Clark says, and then he leaves soon after at the sound of screams from the other side of the world.

Friend, Clark said. He considers Bruce a _friend_. It’s more than Bruce can hope for, and yet—

And yet Bruce’s throat burns the entire night because of it. It’s the first time he heaves out an entire flower, intact.

  
  
  


It’s a blue ivy, Bruce finds out. It symbolizes faith and hope, which is fitting, considering who he loves.

Bruce washes the blood off and puts it on his desk, right next to the potted plant that Clark gave him.

  
  
  


Bruce has to start wearing heavier makeup to hide the sickly pallor of his skin. He can’t go on patrol for longer than three hours unless he wants to spend the next twelve hours passed out in bed or have his whole body aching the next day.

He still hasn’t told Dick.

  
  
  


Bruce wakes up choking. He was too tired last night to think, so he made the mistake of sleeping on his back.

“Perhaps you should consider Miss Ivy’s offer, Master Bruce,” Alfred says later, once he’s dragged it out of Bruce that he almost died that morning.

“No,” Bruce says. “Don’t ask me again, Alfred. Please.”

No. No, it isn’t an option. Bruce isn’t going to ask for Ivy’s help. He doesn’t want to forget. He can’t forget. He’s afraid that he’ll lose a part of himself, that he’d go back to hating Clark and self-destructing if he forgets that he should _love_ Clark.

Bruce will die loving Clark, with hope clear in his mind.

  
  
  


Maybe he should ask Alfred to bring blue ivy flowers to his grave.

  
  
  


He never does get to apologize to Dick in person.

 

**Author's Note:**

> hit me up on [tumblr](http://clqrkkent.tumblr.com/)!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Helianthus](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13843362) by [timetravelingsherlockian](https://archiveofourown.org/users/timetravelingsherlockian/pseuds/timetravelingsherlockian)




End file.
